A Guide to Developing Your Own Java Servlet Container
"How Tomcat Works" (464 pages, $49.99, ISBN 0-9752128-0-X, by Budi Kurniawan and Paul Deck)
covers Tomcat 4 and 5 and is a tutorial on the internal workings of the world most popular Web container. You are welcome to download the sample chapters.
You can also purchase the book from the publisher.
What People Say: How Tomcat Works teaches the reader exactly how the Apache Tomcat Servlet engine works. Budi starts with a very simple (3 classes) web server and slowly, over the course of a dozen chapters, enhances that example until it becomes Tomcat. It's a really cool approach to explaining the inner workings of a system and I just love it. I'm staying up way too late reading the thing and learning a lot about how Tomcat works.
You don't have to be rocket scientist to appreciate the book or understand it. If you have basic Java skills the book will be a little challenging but not too bad. If you have intermediate to advanced Java skills, you'll have no problem at all and you will probably learn a lot.
In my opinion, knowing how the software you use works under the covers is far more important than anything else you can learn. Patterns and APIs are fine, but nothing beats knowing how things really work. The best in the business have this type knowledge, so if you want to be the best at Servlet development, than this book might be for you.
Richard Monson-Haefel Award winning author, open source developer, member of the JCP Executive Committee and a Sr. Analyst for The Burton Group.
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I found a reference to Budi's website and his new book "How Tomcat Works", when I was searching articles about Tomcat. This book is excellent in explaining the design and implementation of Tomcat.
It's clear written, good size, to the point with working code examples.
If you are a developer, this is a very good book. I'm mentoring developers, and have been using the available chapters as primary training material. We have extended Tomcat with new connectors, "discovered surprises" with class loaders and gained a lot from the material.
I recommend this to developers that want to know the architecture and implementation of Tomcat.
Per Pettersson Ericsson Research Inc,
Montreal
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I read the first chapters of "How Tomcat Works". I am eager to see the last chapters about Tomcat 5. While reviewing the Tomcat code, I realized that Tomcat was a large and well designed application. I learned some new design techniques that I will use in my current project, a Web services application.
The code examples are instructive and easy to run. This is a good book for software developers.
